Compact Disc. In its standard form, a soft plastic disc with a thin layer
of aluminum on top, protected by a lacquer layer. Information is written on
the disc in the form of microscopic corrugations (``pits and lands'') of the
aluminum, read from the bottom. The gross physical dimensions are highly
standardized: 120 mm diameter, 1.2 mm thick. The data density is constrained
by the use of 780 nm laser wavelength, with 0.83-µm pits and lands on data
tracks 1.6 microns apart.

There are a variety of formats defined for various kinds of data and
application. The standard music CD uses the Redbook audio format (so called
because the spec was distributed in a red book). This has a bit depth of 16
and a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz.

CD

Compressed Data.

CD

Conduct Disorder.

CD

Congressional District. The region of a US state represented by a member
of the House of Representatives.

Maine has an interesting way of allocating its votes
in the Electoral College. The popular majority
statewide is used to select two electors, and popular majority in each CD
determines ``its'' EC elector. The way things
looked for a long time, it seemed this might matter in 2004. Nebraska uses the
same system, but all districts were expected to go to a single ticket
(Republican). In fact, through 2004 neither state has split its electoral vote
since they changed their allocation laws (1969 in Maine and 1991 in Nebraska).

In the 2004 general election, there was a ballot issue in Colorado to amend the
state constitution. The proposed amendment 36 would have apportioned electoral
votes in proportion to the popular vote (without respect to CD's, but this
seemed a good place to mention it anyway). If passed, it was supposed to take
effect immediately, determining EV apportionment for the 2004 presidential
election. Most polls favored the Republican ticket to win a narrow victory in
the state in 2004, so Democrats stood to benefit from a switch of as many as
four of the state's nine EV's in that cycle. (In the very close election that
was anticipated, that might have been decisive.) The effective-immediately
provision, however, was challenged in court in mid-October, and fear of adding
to election confusion and uncertainty worked against approval of the amendment.
Both major parties opposed the amendment, with one of the main stated
objections being that it would make Colorado a guaranteed fly-over in future
presidential campaigns. The ballot proposition had some popular traction, but
was eventually solidly defeated.

The US House of Representatives is the lower house of a bicameral legislature,
and many democracies have bicameral legislatures with identifiable upper and
lower houses. In parliamentary democracies without a separately elected
executive, however, the different role of parties, the typically attenuated
role of the upper house, and the different dynamics of power make the
correspondence with the US system a bit shaky. With that proviso, at least at
the formal level one may say that in Canada, what correspond to US CD's are
the voting districts for the House of Commons. These are informally known as
``ridings.'' It puts me in the mind of Dudley Do-right, the only cartoon
character I can think of with a hyphenated name.

Crohn's Disease Activity Index. The original was developed and described
by W.R. Best, J.M. Becktel, J.W. Singleton, and F. Kern in ``Development of a
Crohn's Disease Activity Index -- National Cooperative Crohns-Disease Study,''
Gastroenterology, vol. 70, pp. 439-444 (1976). (As of August 15,
2008, that paper had been cited 1551 times in the literature indexed by
ISI.) The metric wasn't very precisely optimized,
to judge from the round-number weights:

CDAI = 2F + 5F + 7F + 20F + 30F + 10F + 6F + F ,
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

where the Fi are ``weight factors'' that you can read about on
this page, which has a CDAI
calculator. The first three authors of that 1976 paper later published
``Rederived Values of the 8 Coefficients of the Crohn Disease Activity Index
(CDAI)'' in vol. 77 of the same journal, pp. 843-846 (1979). The next
article (pp. 847-869), by R.W. Summer, et al., describes the National
Cooperative Crohn Disease Study. I have neither online access to the journal
nor sufficent interest in the subject to walk over to the medical school. The
titles, including the disease name, are quoted as I have them. There are
other, less popular indices of Crohn's-Disease activity.

CDB

Caribbean Development Bank.

C.D.B.

The initials of C. D. ``Charlie'' Bales, suggestive of Cyrano de Bergerac,
get it? C. D. Bales is the lead male role in the movie comedy Roxanne (1987), an updated version
of Edmond Rostand's ``Cyrano de Bergerac'' (funny, but not a comedy).
In that play and this movie, C.D.B. has self-image problems on account of a
long proboscis, falls in love with beautiful Roxanne, helps another man woo
her, and eventually reveals that he is the author of the other man's eloquence.
(Yeah, that's a bit of a spoiler, but a spoiler-ahead warning would not have
been appropriate; part of the experience of classics is that you know how they
turn out before you enter the theater or read the book.)

The real Cyrano de Bergerac was a seventeenth-century writer. In one of his
stories, he proposed seven ways to reach the Moon from Earth, including
rockets. The other six ways wouldn't have worked. In True History,
written in around 150 C.E., Lucian of Samosata explains how a Greek ship could
reach the Moon by winds and water-spouts. When you consider that a water-spout
is a jet and that the propellant in modern rockets is electrolyzed water
(i.e., combusted hydrogen and oxygen), this is amazingly prescient.
In the movie Roxanne, the title character (Roxanne Kowalski, played by Daryl
Hannah) is an astronomer. More on Roxanne and other Steve Martin movies at the
Hfuhruhurr entry.

Community Development Block Grant Program. A program run by the US
Department of Housing and Urban Development. It's
got a bunch of messy allocation formulas and eligibility rules, but basically
the idea is to provide funds to help low-income families fix up their homes.

CDBS

Coincidence Doppler-Broadening Spectroscopy.

CDC

California Department of Corrections. Either this
is the department of office supplies in charge of white-out, or it's the prison
system. Your guess is as good as mine, I bet. An interesting Prisoner's Dictionary is
mostly based on the CDC dialect.

Control Data Corporation. Founded 1957.
Used to be in the computer hardware business (see this little memorial
to their CYBER machines), but now they hawk ``E-Commerce Solutions'' and
``Systems Integration Services.'' It was originally organized by a bunch of
executives who left ERA, but it is remembered in the hardware community as one
of the companies that the renowned engineer
Seymour Cray worked at. After he joined in Sept. 1957, a month after CDC
formed, he got them to work on supercomputers for scientific calculation.
Cray left in 1972 to form his own eponymous company (CRI).

CDD

Católicas por el Derecho a Decidir.
Normally translated `Catholics for the right to choose,' but the female plural
is marked, so an accurate translation is `Catholic women for the right to
choose.' CDD is a pro-choice organization in various Latin American countries.
Latin America generally has abortion laws more restrictive than those in Europe
and the English-speaking countries. Unexpectedly, a regional rash of leftist
governments at the beginning of the 21st century has coincided with legislative
movement to further restrict abortion.

CD-DA

Compact Disc-Digital Audio. Original-flavor
CD. The acronym continued to be used for a while
on computers to indicate that the CD-ROM drive
could play audio tracks.

CDDI

Copper Distributed Data Interface. Same protocol as FDDI; name only indicates that implementation is on a
copper-cable LAN.

It provides speeds up to 100 Mbps, for distances up
to approximately 200 km, but only 125 mi., yet again demonstrating the
inferiority of the metric system.

The copper cables are shielded twisted pairs, thus the alternative name
SDDI.

Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Modern incarnation
(interesting word, there; you got a licence to say that?) of the
sixteenth-century Roman Inquisition. (Yeah, the Spanish Inquisition had
a head start.)

Ohhh -- still crazy.
Still cra-ay-zy.
Still crazy after all these years!

Well, they had to give up physical torture and immolation in the eighteenth
century. But they still get to work in secret, ignore their own rules,
conduct kangaroo proceedings, lie, punish their enemies, excommunicate, etc.
So it's fun work if you can get it. I hear the church is short of normal
heterosexual men who would like to take vows of celibacy and obedience, but I
haven't yet seen help-wanted ads for CDF in particular. Until then you might
get some pointers from The Modern Inquisition : Seven prominent Catholics
and their struggles with the Vatican, by Paul Collins (Woodstock and New
York: Overlook Pr., 2002).

Collector Diffusion Isolation. In ordinary junction
isolation, an n-type epi layer is grown over a p-type substrate. The
region of the epi layer deeper than the metallurgical BC junction is collector
material for an npn transistor. It is necessary to
surround this n material with a p-doped sidewall that will function as a
reverse-biased junction, and this is done by an extended p-diffusion. CDI
instead manages to save a fabrication step by using a p-doped epi layer.
Thus, the surrounding p-layer is already in place. The buried layer now is not
the subcollector but the main part of the collector, and isolation requires a
deep doping by n, not just to contact the buried layer but also to surround the
part of the epitaxial region that will be base. The steps saved are both the
isolation and base-forming p diffusions.

The method is obsolete a few times over.

CD-I

Compact Disc - Interactive. A format used by Philips for their interactive
CD player. Cannot be played back on a
conventional audio CD player.

Compact Disc - Karaoke. No really! I am sooo
not making this up! (In contrast with other similarly amusing entries.)
Perpetrated jointly by JVC and Phillips, it's a 12 cm disc with 74 minutes of
audio, video, and text. (No, I don't know what a minute of text is.) Playable
on CD-I and some CD-G
players.

CaDmium Oxide. (CdO is the
chemical formula, not some randomly selected abbreviation.) This is an
infrequently studied II-VI compound. It has a
lattice constant of 4.689 Å and direct bandgap of 2.5 eV at room temperature.

Chief Diversity Officer. A top university official in charge of minimizing
intellectual diversity, or a top corporate official in charge of minimizing
legal adversity. If you want to see real diversity, look at all the different
CXO's that there are.

Census-Designated Place. A place designated by the US census. Not too
arbitrarily, but not especially systematically.

Different entries for a given head text, usually corresponding to different
expansions of a shared initialism, are normally ordered in this glossary by
alphabetizing on the definition text. I figured this is a good place to point
that out, since this entry is almost problematical. Alphabetization here is
based on the immediate appearance of text rather than on its expansion. (The
reasoning is that if you knew all that, you wouldn't be looking it up. The
flaw in the reasoning is that since you don't know all that, the ordering isn't
especially helpful.)

Here's some standard Census Bureau boilerplate, taken from the same appendix as
the MCD boilerplate; I've only added a hyphen and an otiose parenthetical aside:

Census-designated places (CDPs) are delineated for each decennial census as the
statistical counterparts of incorporated places. CDPs are delineated to
provide census data for concentrations of population, housing, and commercial
structures that are identifiable by name but are not within an incorporated
place. CDP boundaries usually are defined in cooperation with state, local,
and tribal officials. [What -- no community activists??? Stonewalling!]
These boundaries, which usually coincide with visible features or the boundary
of an adjacent incorporated place or other legal entity boundary, have no legal
status, nor do these places have officials elected to serve traditional
municipal functions. CDP boundaries may change from one decennial census to
the next with changes in settlement pattern; a CDP with the same name as in an
earlier census does not necessarily have the same boundary.

CDPD

Cellular Digital Packet Data.

CDPF

Comb-like Dispersion-Profiled Fiber. Alternating lengths of standard (high
dispersion) telecom fiber and dispersion-shifted (low dispersion) fiber, giving
a comb-like dispersion profile as a function of wavelength. In order to get
regular spacing in wavelength, the pattern of lengths of high- and
low-dispersion fiber has to be chirped.

Coded Departure Routes. Routes predefined and designated by codes, for
use to route air traffic around areas of severe weather.

Cdr., CDR

Commander.

CD-R

Compact Disc - Recordable. Although some
rewritable discs are coming out (1996), ``CD-R'' refers to an older write-once,
read-many (WORM) technology. Learn more at
Andy McFadden's CD-R
FAQ and in three newsgroups:

Multimedia 200. No search engine, but
so few titles you won't miss it.

CD-ROM X, CD-ROM XA

CD-ROM eXtended Architecture. ``Yellow-Book Plus.''

CdS

CaDmium Sulfide. (CdS
is the chemical formula, not some randomly selected abbreviation.) When I was
a kid I had a CdS cell in my electronic projects kit. I believe it changed
resistance in response to light. I'm pretty sure selenium does the same; it
was a famous discovery.

Lattice constant of 4.136 Å is by far the smallest among common compound
semiconductors, so it doesn't lattice match or even make a tolerable
pseudomorphic heterointerface with anything, so it isn't used to make any
heterostructures. Room-temperature direct bandgap of 2.42 eV isn't very exciting either.

CDS

Centre des Démocrates Sociaux.

CDS

Child-Directed Speech. Speech directed to a child. Defines a range of
linguistic registers.

CDS

Corona Discharge Spectroscopy. Coronal Diagnostic Spectrometer.

CDS

Credit Default Swap.

CdSe

Cadmium Selenide. A direct gap II-VI
compound semiconductor with a bandgap of 1.8 eV at
room temperature and
atmospheric pressure. The conduction band rises in hydrostatic pressure,
while the valence band falls. Uniaxial pressure raises heavy hole band
and lowers the light hole band. This is typical.

Cadmium Telluride. HgCdTe-based (MCT-based)
materials and devices are currently most of the commercial II-VI market and are used primarily for IR detectors.

Bandgap of CdTe is 1.58 eV; lattice constant is 6.482 Å.

According to a 1996.11.20 posting by
Fei Long in the semiconductors-2-6 newsgroup, he
(at the University of Hull) and
Paul Harrison (at the University of Leeds) had
recently published work on the CdTe band structure. Here's the meat of the posting.

CDU

Catholic Distance University. It's based
in Herndon, Virginia, but I suppose you might ``go'' there and never know it.
It's a ``University'' because it offers an MA in Religious Studies. (Otherwise
it would be the ``CDC.'')

This is probably a good place to mention the problem of Man's alienation from
God, and how it's much worse than not being able to attend classes located
conveniently near your home. And how the rapture will take place at warp
speed. (But maybe I have the wrong religion. Do they teach Kierkegaard?)
However, I don't know enough about all that and the information doesn't seem to
be within reaching distance, so I'll just quote CDU's homepage, which says it
was
``established in 1983 to respond to the need for life long spiritual formation
and a deeper knowledge of Church Teaching. CDU's mission calls for transmitting
faithfully and systematically the teachings of Sacred Scripture, the living
Tradition of the Church and the authentic Magisterium, as well as the spiritual
heritage of the Fathers, Doctors and Saints.''

The Courses-and-Programs
page has a cool picture of the old pope hunched over a laptop. (I mean
``old pope'' here not as opposed to ``new pope'' but as opposed to ``younger
pope.'' In other words, the same old pope when he was new.) This picture
reminds me of those tired old gag pictures of people holding up monuments. You
know: someone stands in the foreground with arms raised and palms flattened
under an imaginary weight, and in the background a mass of concrete or
whatever, lined up by the photographer's angle to appear to be pressing down on
those thumbs. I mean, the pope is always hunched over squinting at the floor a
few feet away. Put an open laptop before him and it's a wrap!
(The laptop is black. Unless you're going as a Cardinal or as one of those
fruit-colored Swiss guards, black is the only fashionable color for Vatican
City.)

Another thing that picture reminds me of is an early
Saturday Night Live sketch in which President
Ronald Reagan does a rap video. Whenever the old man has to move, a couple of
Secret Service men pick him up by the shoulders like a talking prop. It had a
catchy tune, too.

The ``Ronald Reagan'' in the preceding paragraph, by the way, was not the
actual president. Ralph Nader and Al Gore have appeared on the program, and
probably some others who were presidential candidates, but the closest they got
to having Ronald Reagan on the show was when they got his son Michael Reagan
on. Michael (a dancer at the time) did a skit in which he jumped around in his
skivvies, and it was reported that his parents wondered why. (It was a parody
of a scene in a popular movie of the time -- Tom Cruise in ``Risky Business''?
I can't find it on the web, so I guess this didn't happen either.)

Along about this point, when I first wrote this entry, I thought it would be
apposite to put in a link to wherever it was in the glossary that I told a
related story about Benoit Mandelbrot, but I couldn't find it. Coming back
now, I see that the story is in the glossary, so I can provide a link to it.

Benoit Mandelbrot was the fellow who gave the name fractal to geometric
objects of noninteger dimension, and he promoted fractals so effectively that
scientists actually recognized their value and fractals achieved a pop-culture
vogue. Mandelbrot was a sort of scholar-in-residence at
IBM's main research labs (I guess that would be in
White Plains, NY), at least in the late seventies and
eighties, and he was naturally part of a video that IBM made then to spread the
gospel of fractal beauty. In the video, Mandelbrot does a little introduction,
then turns to a desktop computer and watches as a fractal begins to fill the
screen. The audience may be forgiven for assuming that Mandelbrot has pressed
a key to launch the application. However, the story goes that Mandelbrot, who
worked at IBM as a mathematician (other people did his programming), was so
computer-phobic or -averse that he refused to so much as lower a finger onto
the keyboard. The way the problem was eventually handled was that somebody
crouched behind the chair while Mandelbrot talked, then with one finger on the
keyboard launched the necessary application, all below the camera's view. I
heard this at a seminar at Princeton Plasma Labs at Forrestal in about 1983,
but I can't find this story on the web either.

CDU

Christlich-Demokratische Union. Main conservative party of Germany,
`Christian Democratic Union.' The CDU and CSU
form a single grouping in the federal parliament, and have an agreement not to
run against each other: the CSU's turf is Bavaria, Germany's largest state, and
the CDU's is the rest of the country. As you may have guessed without
following the CSU link, the party names have in common the words translated
`Christian' and `Union.' Neither party is particularly Christian these days,
although the current CDU party leader is the daughter of a Lutheran minister of
the old East Germany. A common way to refer to the CDU and CSU collectively in
Germany is as die Union. Their frequent coalition partner has been the
lone nationally significant small party of the right, the
FDP. A color-code shorthand is also used (CDU/CSU
black; FDU yellow; socialist parties red).

Under the leadership of CDU Chancellor Helmut Kohl,
Germany was reunited after the fall of the Berlin
Wall. In 1998, after 16 years of rule, with continuing high unemployment and
relatively slow economic growth, and in a continuing secret-campaign-funding
scandal involving Mr. Kohl, the CDU suffered its worst electoral defeat since
1949. In the September 27 general elections, CDU/CSU won 35.2% of the vote,
down from 41.4% in the 1994 elections, and ended up with 245 out of 669
Bundestag seats.

A red-green coalition (socialists and environmentalists) came to power, and
Gerhard Schroeder, the new prime minister,
promised to fix the economy. In a Nixon-goes-to-China sort of way (that is,
with his solid leftist credentials to protect him), it was expected that he
would be able to negotiate with the trade unions to reduce the job and
unemployment benefits that make German labor expensive and German manufacture
less competitive than it is regarded as needing to be. (Interestingly,
however, one thing that Germany did not have as late as 2005 was a national
minimum wage. One might reason that this is in the interests of the powerful
industrial unions, which negotiate industry-wide minimum hourly wage
agreements. Apart from this, however, the Sozialhilfe, which is more
extensive than the social welfare available in the US, supplements the income
of low-wage earners. Other EU nations without a
statutory minimum-wage law are Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland,
Austria, Italy, and Cyprus.)

Schroeder had no significant success solving Germany's economic problems, and
by the Summer of 2002 he and his party were behind in the polls. By making
opposition to the US-led invasion of Iraq the main issue in the campaign, he
was able to distract attention from the slow-growth economy and win.

In 2005, he again tried making an issue of US foreign policy, by insisting that
Germany would not send troops to Iraq. It worked almost to the point of
victory. He made up a substantial deficit in the polls, and the SPD forced the
CDU into a tightly negotiated and greatly hamstrung red-black coalition.

Proof
here that people smart enough to describe condensed matter physics
research are not too smart to write ``CDW wave'' (an acronym AAP). Cf. next entry.

CDW

Collision Damage Waiver. An automobile rental scam legal in many states
and provinces.
A CDW is not the renter's waiver of any rights, as the name implies. Instead,
it is an agreement to pay an extra ten dollars or so per day so that the
rental agency will not sue the renter to recover its losses if the vehicle is
damaged or stolen (or otherwise lost, I suppose). If the rental agency is
waiving it's rights, then its agent should be initialing the box.
Anyway. The rate charged is normally so far in excess of normal insurance
rates that many states have made it illegal or mandated a low rate. Your
personal automobile insurance may cover it, but you forgot to check with your
insurance agent before traveling, again.

Click here to see some instances of the ever-popular ``CDW waiver,''
an AAP pleonasm. (Of course, this may only
apply to the principle driver. Click here for that. The two usages seem to occur
with comparable frequency, although the second is occasionally correct.)
Cf. preceding entry.

C&D waste

Construction and Demolition waste.

CE

Cab-to-End (distance). The distance from the back of the truck cab to
the rear end of the frame.

Council of Economic Advisers [sic]. An organization that can be
ignored in the formulation of future economic policy and blamed for past
economic policy.

CEADEL

Centro de Apoyo al Desarrollo Local.
`Center for support of local development,' an Argentine organization.

CEAM

Center for Exposure Assessment
Modeling. ``The EPA Center for Exposure
Assessment Modeling (CEAM) was established in 1987 to meet the scientific and
technical exposure assessment needs of the United States Environmental
Protection Agency (U.S. EPA) as well as state environmental and resource
management agencies. CEAM provides proven predictive exposure assessment
techniques for aquatic, terrestrial, and multimedia pathways for organic
chemicals and metals.''

CEAMR

Coordination Européenne des Associations de Maladies Rares.
The old
webpage for this entity is no longer hosted by Infobiogen, but maybe you
can find what you want at AMR.

Continuing Education of the Bar. Dedicated to the continuing education
of lawyers. Pretty sordid stuff, huh?

CEBAF

Continuous Electron-Beam Accelerator Facility. A facility that has been
used for nuclear physics experiments since the 1990's. In 1996 the institution
around the original linear accelerator became known as the ``Thomas Jefferson
National Accelerator Facility (JLab), though
``CEBAF'' continues to be used as the name for the linear accelerator. The
distinction is a bit slippery. (E.g., the University of Virginia hosts a
``Governor's Distinguished CEBAF Professor'' position.)

CEBus

Consumer Electronics BUS. CEBus is the registered trademark of EIA for its
open standard for home automation. The standard is also known as IS-60 and
EIS-600. The standard is promoted by CIC.

Convention to Eliminate
All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. A UN
legal convention. In Spanish, it's la
``Convención Sobre la Eliminación de Todas las Formas de
Discriminación Contra la Mujer (CEDAW).'' In
French, it's la ``Convention sur
l'élimination de toutes les formes de discrimination à
l'égard des femmes.'' This is the way that UN staff actually talk.
You can rent UN personnel to perform at children's birthday parties -- they're
like clowns, but more existentially surprising. And they're not funny, but --
it's the latest thing! All the Hollywood celebrities are doing it! (Okay --
actually, they don't exactly ``perform.'' They just mill around and
disapprove.) Available in six official languages; blue helmets cost extra;
will not go into bad neighborhoods. Not recommended for younger children.
Warning: UN personnel should never be left alone unsupervised with older
children.

(In Spanish, the use of the singular ``la mujer'' to stand for women in
general is a standard usage.) There's also a Committee on the Elimination of
Discrimination against Women (Comité para la Eliminación de la
Discriminación contra la Mujer; Comité pour
l'élimination de la discrimination à l'égard des
femmes). It is not abbreviated, as CEDAW or anything else, so far
as I'm aware. This committee is ``a
body [uh-huh] of 23 [what is this -- Sufi mysticism?] independent experts''
(oh sure) that ``receive[s] and consider[s] communications (petitions) from, or
on behalf of, individuals or a group of individuals who claim to be victims of
violations of the rights protected by the Convention.'' Rent by the hour;
special rates for holidays and weekends.

La Cour européenne des Droits de
l'Homme. French: `the European court
of the rights of man.' (Officially `European Court of Human Rights,' ECHR.) The court is housed in the Palais des Droits
de l'Homme in Strasbourg. The building looks like a cross between an oil
refinery and the futuristic circular residence in Woody Allen's movie Sleeper
(mentioned at the electrical banana
entry).

College Entrance Examination Board. The stuff you are more likely to have
come here to find out, if your mind isn't half as twisted as mine, is still a
couple of paragraphs down.

The year 1899 was an interesting year in American college admissions. In June,
Helen Keller passed the entrance examination of Radcliffe College, Harvard
University. An ``Answers to Correspondents'' column in the August 19 New York
Times reported that

Helen Keller, sometimes spelled Kellar, was born in Tuscambia, Ala., July 27,
1880. Her father was Arthur H. Keller, a Confederate officer, an editor, and
at one time United States Marshal of Alabama. At the age of eighteen months,
Helen, a bright and active child, was overcome by a disease which deprived her
of sight, hearing, and the use of the organs of speech. At the age of seven
years her parents began to educate her. In 1887 she was taken to Boston, where
she became the pupil of Miss Sullivan, who remains with her to-day. Miss
Sullivan was three years teaching the child lip reading. She will enter
Radcliffe College, Harvard's Annex, in September. The girl is a relative of
Robert E. Lee, and a great-great-granddaughter of Alexander Spottswood, the
first Colonial Governor of Virginia. She is remarkably pretty, and has a
lovable, poetic nature.

But the year's truly consequential event in college entrance exam history took
place on December 1 in Trenton, New Jersey, at the 13th annual convention of
the Association of Colleges and Preparatory Schools of the Middle States and
Maryland. There before over 500 delegates, Prof. Nicholas Murray Butler (Dean
of the School of Philosophy at Columbia University) read a paper urging the
creation of a unified system for testing candidates for college admission. In
a discussion following the paper, President Eliot of Harvard and President Low
of Columbia pronounced themselves enthusiastically in favor of the proposal.
President Patton of Princeton expressed reservations.

At the time, each college had its own set of requirements, with examinations in
different sets of subjects, and different topics in the subjects they had in
common. Each college offered examinations in various cities in areas of the
country from which it expected to accept students. The chief selling point of
Butler's proposal, however, was not the relief it would give the colleges from
the burden of designing and administering all those exams. Rather, the
advantage stressed was that standardization of entrance requirements would make
it possible for secondary schools to know what to teach their students. (The
discussion implicitly assumed that in the past, students had studied for only
one exam.)

Under Butler's proposal, it was contemplated that tests would be created for
each subject then currently part of the entrance examinations of two or more
colleges, and that colleges could base their admissions on the students'
performance on the subjects they chose to use as their basis for admission.
(This information would be provided in certificates to be issued by the
board administering the tests.)

The delegates at the Trenton meeting endorsed the plan.
The proposed board was duly founded in 1900 as the College Entrance Examination
Board of the Middle States and Maryland. Here is the list of chief examiners
of the first Board of Examiners (along with the institutions where they were
professors), announced on December 15, 1900, after their election by the
College Board:

The following January 22, Prof. Butler of Columbia, in his capacity as
Secretary of the College Board, released a list that included associate
examiners. Each group of examiners consisted of one chief and two associate
examiners. In each case, one associate was from a different college than the
chief examiner, and the other associate was a secondary school teacher. (For
Latin and mathematics groups they were high school
principals.)

All of the schools represented on the Board of Examiners were in Pennsylvania,
New Jersey, New York, or (in the sole case of JHU) Maryland. I assume
therefore that ``Middle States'' stood for the three northern Mid-Atlantic
states.

In the January 22 announcement, Butler claimed that all colleges in the middle
states and Maryland, as well as most colleges in the nation, would accept
the College Board's certificates in lieu of their own exams.

Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa. More
common acronym than CEEMA, but less common than CEMEA.

CEERT

Coalition for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies.

CEF

Canadian Expeditionary Force. During WWI,
Allied forces fighting in France included the Americans (AEF), British (BEF) and the
Canadians (CEF).

Moving on up the alphabet, we notice that the Dutch sat out that war. It is
commonly suggested that the German occupation of the Netherlands in WWII, which
was mild compared to that of countries to the east, was resented more keenly by
the Dutch because they hadn't suffered occupation in the previous war.
Perhaps. As the war was ending and the Germans withdrew, there was famine in
the cities; many people went into the countryside and dug up flower bulbs for
food.

Not technically a part of the Canadian Forces were those of Newfoundland,
mentioned at the Memorial entry.

Raymond Chandler, creator of Philip Marlowe and author of The Big Sleep
and other works, was born in the US on July 23, 1888. After his parents'
divorce, he moved to London with his mother in 1895 and was educated in
England. He returned to the US in 1912, and in 1914 enlisted in the Canadian
Army. (He joined the Canadian Army because they paid a dependent's allowance
that he could send to his mother.) He served in the First Division of the CEF
in France and became a platoon commander.
In 1918 he was attached to the Royal Flying Corps (later the
R.A.F.), but had not completed flight training when
the Armistice came. He was demobilized in England; his mother returned with
him to California.

Check which way the steam rises from your corned-beef hash before you
start with the pepper shaker.

CEIN

Center
for the Environmental Implications of Nanotechnology. The US
EPA, ``as part of its Science to Achieve Results
(STAR) program, through its interagency partner
NSF[,] are [sic] seeking proposals to
create a national Center [sic] to conduct fundamental research and
education on the implications of nanotechnology for the environment and living
systems at all scales. The Center will address interactions of naturally
derived, incidental and engineered nanoparticles and nanostructured materials,
devices and systems (herein called ``nanomaterials'') with the living world.''
When you're handing out the money, no one corrects your grammar.

ceinture

A rare word, but all three major
Scrabble dictionaries know it. According to the OSPD, it's a belt for the waist. In Spanish, cintura means `waist' and the
word's augmentative form cinturón means `belt.' In
France it's one of two ring railways around Paris:
the petite ceinture and the grande ceinture.

cel

CELluloid, or a sheet of transparent CElLuloid (or is that CElluLoid?) of
the sort that used to be used in making animations.

The legendary cartoonist Chuck Jones (b. Sept. 21, 1912; d. Feb. 22, 2002) got
his first regular job in 1932, washing cels. According to his grandson Craig
Kausen, ``he thought he was going to be cleaning in a prison.''

Information in ATM is passed in 53-byte
``cells.'' These consist of 48 bytes of payload and five bytes of header. The
process of dicing the data into 48-byte segments and of reassembling the data
from these segments is performed in the SAR
sublayer of the ATM adaptation layer (AAL).

The cell header holds addressee and flow-control information, in the form of
values for six fields:

A portable wireless phone. The ``cell'' refers to the fact that the
system it's part of divides (some of) the earth's surface into cells, each
served by a transceiver that relays messages between phones in the cell and the
wireline communication network.

Have you heard about this philosophy
conference in Budapest, April 28-30, 2005?
``Seeing, Understanding, Learning in the Mobile Age.'' Contributions ``invited
from philosophers, psychologists, education theorists, and other interested
scholars [could this include electrical engineers? nah!] on the following and
related topics:

epistemology of the mobile phone

from seeing to understanding

visual communication and pictorial meaning

from static pictures to dynamic images

writing, speaking, messaging

collective thinking and the network individual

mobile communication and scientific change

technology, media and the dissemination of knowledge

ubiquitous learning and the transformation of education''

You learn something new every day. I didn't realize that anyone considered
``education theorists'' to be scholars, interested or otherwise.

cell-phone violence

No, I'm not talking about grabbing the thing out of her hand and throwing
or crushing it. That's as trite as sex; everyone has that fantasy at least
weekly, and some people indulge the fantasy. Also, there are many reports of
fans throwing cell phones at basketball players, though this is not common in
the US.

Okay, enough about that poor, long-suffering supermodel. Here's a strange
incident took place just before midnight, on April 23, 2005, along the possibly
quite aptly named Savage-Guilford Road in Howard County, Md. Occupants of a
vehicle shouted to a male pedestrian, who at first thought they were
acquaintances. He approached the vehicle, and a male passenger appeared to
point a weapon at him. Another passenger got out and ordered the pedestrian to
empty his pockets. The other two occupants of the vehicle then got out. One
grabbed the pedestrian around the throat, and the assailants rifled the
pedestrian's pockets and took a cell phone. The assailants then drove away
with the cell phone, made a U-turn and drove back. One of them threw the cell
phone at the pedestrian and the robbers fled.

December 15, 2005, Council
Bluffs, Iowa. A 48-year-old man rammed his pickup into the wooden deck in
front of Chit Chat Wireless store at 2034 W. Broadway. The man, a Chit Chat
subscriber who was clearly not well-gruntled by his cell-phone service, then
got out of the truck and approached the front door of Chit Chat Wireless,
evidently to have a chit chat. An employee inside the store judged that the
man was ``up to no good,'' as he later told police, so he locked the door. The
tough customer told the employee to open the door, but the employee accountably
refused. (Well, unaccountably is a word....) The man then became upset
(that's how the police report put it) and began punching and kicking at the
glass door. He succeeded in shattering the glass, but didn't get in. (This
would be the right time to cue the ``I hear you knockin' / But you can't come
in'' ringtone.) He then threw his cell phone at the door and drove off. The
customer was later arrested at a hospital where he sought treatment for the
hand he hurt breaking the door.

CELTA

Certificate in
English Language Teaching to Adults. A test and curriculum designed and
coordinated by Cambridge University ESOL. Given the provenance, it's not
surprising that it is more commonly used in the Commonwealth. As of November
2003, the US has nine testing centers, Canada has eight, and Australia
nineteen.

To be frank, they should have saved this acronym for teachers of Gaelic. (The
Franks were speakers of a West Germanic language in the area of present-day
northern France. Their language was influential in
the development of the French language, and the name France is derived
from the tribe's name.)

CEMA

Communist Economic Mummble and Ahhh I don't know. I'll get back to you
on that. Economic development assistance for the former Soviet Union,
apparently.

Got it! It's:

Council for Mutual Economic Assistance.

To be frank, I think ``Communist Economic Mummble and Ahhh'' is more
informmative.

A childish misspelling of cementary
(which see, for key info). We use childish missspellings as a sort of kindly,
winking joke, whistfully sighing and thinkong how we were young and
orthograhically chalenged once, two.

A place where the buried dead can be visited. From cement, in the
transferred sense of emotional binding and also because people used to be
buried in... oh wait -- that's not right! It's cemetery, and I pronounced it incorrectly
for over forty years!

I suppose the reason for my error is that in my native
Spanish, the word is cementerio. After I
became aware of the difference, I noticed that my mom makes the same error in
English. But the error may not be so rare -- I heard it in a radio ad in 2005.
Another word whose spelling in Spanish can
easily mislead one in English is substraer (`to subtract'). That is, I
used to, uh, em, never mind.

Graveyard. From Middle English cimitery (though MEng spelling
wobbled quite a bit) < Middle French
cimitere < Late Latin coemeterium < Greekkoimêtêrion, `sleeping chamber,' already used
euphemistically in the sense of `burial place.' No connection with scimitar,
I'm reasonably sure. See the starve entry,
however, for a semantic shift associated with mode of death.

The Spanish cognate is cementerio. Yes,
that's with an en. Perhaps the en got in there via an assumed connection with
entierro (`burial') and enterrar (`to inter'). I feel compelled
to mention that the Spanish words for exhume, exhumation are constructed
as something like ``unbury, unburial'' (desenterrar, desentierro).

A few miles east of Point Concepcion (probably Punto Concepción
at some point in its history -- particularly the point of its first
conception), there's a ``Canada Cementeria'' according to the map. That is, a
Cañada Cementería. This is either the cement-mixing
ravine or the burial gully. If it were in New Jersey instead of California,
that wouldn't be ambiguous. (If you find the last comment confusing, see the
teamster entry. If you haven't had enough of
obfuscated interlingual puns, visit the faux
ami entry. For another example of an unexpected en, see the
gringo entry.) For an instance involving
a similar pair of sounds in a pair of words having similar meanings, see the
mujerengo and
mujeriego entries.

What, still here? Don't you follow links? Try this one, for an epitaph.

In Europe, CEN works in partnership with CENELEC
-- the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (www.cenelec.be)
and ETSI -- the European Telecommunications
Standards Institute (www.etsi.fr).

The hundredth part of something, usually money. One US cent is one
one-hundredth part of a US dollar.

In music, a cent is one one-hundredth of a half tone. Since music intervals
are not absolute frequency differences but frequency ratios, this means more
precisely that two notes differing by one cent have pitches (frequencies) in
the ratio of 21/1200 (yes, the 1200th root of two). For example,
in the usual tuning, the fifth string of a six-string guitar is an A with a
frequency of 110 Hz. If you're sitting in my bedroom with the air
conditioning roaring and you're tryin' to tune that string with one o'them
newfangled eelectronic tuners, the 120 Hz component of the A/C vibration is going to spoof the tuner, to the tune
of one or two half-steps (or half-tones -- we can do it both ways). Now you
want to know,

Chief Executive Officer. In the US, it is very common for the offices of
CEO and Chairman of the Board to be held by the same person. A notable
exception occurred at GM during a period when
stockholders were so distrustful of management that the chairman functioned
effectively as an independent monitor of management for a vigilant board. (For
an unusual and certifiably silly alternative expansion of CEO, in a case where
the CEO fulfills the usual functions of a chief executive officer, see the bit
on Walt Freese.)

This situation may be contrasted with that of the corresponding
legislative authority of the federal government of the US:
According to Art. I, Sec. 6 of the US constitution,

No Senator or Representative shall, during the Time for which he was
elected, be appointed to any civil Office under the Authority of the
United States, which shall have been created, or the Emoluments
whereof shall have been encreased during such time; and no Person
holding any Office under the United States, shall be a Member of
either House during his Continuance in Office.

Similarly, Art. II, Sec. 1 forbids members of the Electoral College to
hold other federal office:

... no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an
Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed
an Elector.

[The Electoral College was originally intended to select the President, but
the twelfth amendment, court decisions and practical developments have
turned it into a rubber stamp, conveying the decisions of the majorities of
voters in the several states. There are persistent movements to abolish the
Electoral College because of its nominal status, because of the possibility
of mischief (electors' violation of their pledges to a candidate --
i.e. insubordination to the public will), and because of perceived
problems with the coarse-graining procedure (winner-takes-whole-state)
associated with the College.]

On the executive side, the restriction on multiple offices takes a weaker
form:

The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a
Compensation, which shall neither be increased nor diminished during
the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not
receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United
States, or any of them.

European corporations are generally less likely to have the same person
serve as CEO and Chairman. Also, many publicly held corporations in
Europe -- particularly in Germany (.de) it seems --
have worker (viz. union) representation on the board.

The Chairman of the Board is not very often abbreviated as COB.

The late Frank Sinatra was also referred to as ``Ol' Blue Eyes'' and
``the Chairman of the Board.'' Another New Jersey (NJ) music icon, Bruce Springsteen, is known as ``the
Boss.'' In 1984, Bruce Springsteen and the E
Street Band had a hit with an album (and its title track)
``Born in the U.S.A.''

Yet another pop music icon with a rank appellation was Nat ``King'' Cole. He
was born in the USA, but not in New Jersey. He was born in Montgomery,
Alabama, on March 17, 1917.

During the Cold War, the USSR usually (from the late sixties or so) held
an advantage in strategic missile throw weight. (The US usually led in
SLBM's and bombers.) An important part of the
argument in parity computations was the fact that more accurate missiles
can kill a target using less megatonnage.

Centro de Estudios y Promoción Agraria. `Center for the
study and promotion of agriculture,' an Argentine organization. In Spanish as spoken in
Argentina (as well as Andalusia in Spain and
throughout Spanish America), cepa is a homonym of sepa (`that
[the person] know'). This is probably as good a place as any to mention that
Agricola was a great medieval metallurgist.

CEPAD

Centro de Estudios de la Participacón y Desarrollo.
`Center for studies of participation and development,'
an Argentine organization.

CEPAL

Comisión Económica para
América Latina y el Caribe. In any Latin American
Spanish accent, this is pronounced indistinguishably from
sepal.

The library has been trying to unload some back issues of Revista de la
CEPAL on its dollar table, and I'm going to give them some free
advertising. The journal seems to be a thrice-yearly (April, August, December)
publication of the United Nations, ISSN 0251-0257,
edited and printed in Santiago, Chile. For a dollar, that should be enough.

CEPH

Centre d'Étude du Polymorphisme
Humain. Since April 1993, it has been the Fondation Jean Dausset -
CEPH. (CEPH ``is a
research laboratory created in 1984 by Professor Jean Dausset (Nobel Prize,
medicine and physiology, 1980). This laboratory constructs maps of the human
genome. The original idea of Professor Dausset was to provide the scientific
community with resources for the human genome mapping.'')

CEPIQ

Centre d'Épidémiologie d'Intervention du
Québec. A public health organization based in Laval that seems to
have disappeared around 2001, although acronym dictionaries everywhere
faithfully continue to expand its acronym. We do our part; if you want
immunizations, that's your problem.

CEPPO

Chemical Emergency Preparedness and Prevention Office. Part of the US EPA.

A ceramic package for microelectronic chips, with vertical leads,
for pin-through-hole mounting, which
point down in two parallel rows along opposite sides of the package.
They come in different styles, and the ``sidebraze'' type is illustrated
above. For the more traditional type of package, see illustration at
cerdip below. Specs for some are published
on the web by National
Semiconductor.

CERamic Dual In-line Package. Unfortunately, there is something in the
nomenclature here that resembles the ROM/RAM situation. While ceramic
dual-in-line packages come in different forms, the acronym cerdip refers
implicitly to the traditional pressed ceramic package with glass seal,
recognizable from the solder-dip leads that come out the sides of the
package and bend down (figure below).

CerE

CERamic Engineer[ing].

cereal box

According to the lyrics of Edie Brickell's ``What I Am,'' philosophy is
talk on a cereal box. The following wordful thoughts are from The
Fundamental Forms of Social Thought, by Dr. Werner Stark (New York: Fordham
U.P., 1963, $5.50), p. 89.

... Now the copula `is' which Radcliffe-Brown himself uses here--`he is
a biological organism': `he is a citizen of England'--is highly
significant. He does not say: a man has a body or he plays a
role. This form of words is avoided because it implies a third element, namely
the true self, which neither is a body but has a body, nor
is a role-complex but plays roles. Am I really no more than body
on the one hand, actor on the social stage on the other? Am I not a
substantive ego in the Cartesian sense....

Religion: a smile on a dog.

Yeah, yeah, I gotta add some stuff on President William Jefferson (``Bill'')
Clinton, a former Rhodes scholar, who expounded on the copulative verb to a
grand jury:

It depends upon what the meaning of the word ``is'' is.

(The wording of Clinton's testimony has been variously reported, by people who
in many cases are only indifferently interested in accuracy. A more
accuracy-oriented discussion of the quote occurred on the
<alt.fan.cecil-adams> newsgroup,
first
threading at the end of December 2000. The version quoted above was transcribed
by a newsgroup contributor from a video of the jury testimony.

Ceres

The largest asteroid by far, accounting for about a third of the mass of
the asteroid belt, Ceres was discovered by Giuseppe Piazzi on the first day of
the nineteenth century. It nicely filled the gap between
Mars and Jupiter where the Titius-Bode rule predicted there ought to be a
planet, and among the kinds of astronomical objects then known it seemed to fit
in among the planets, so a planet it was declared to be. After other solar
satellites began to be found with similar orbits, the category of asteroids was
invented; Ceres was reclassified as an asteroid, and was no longer regarded as
a planet. There matters stood for a century and a half.

In 2006 it was reclassified as a dwarf planet. For the time being, at least,
it's clearly not a plutoid, because plutoids are
trans-Neptunian by (current) definition, or at least sometimes trans-Neptunian.
I've also read equivocal claims about whether Ceres ceased or did not cease to
be an asteroid. I hereby issue a Stammtisch Beau Fleuve Directive recognizing
Ceres as an asteroid. I can't be bothered to sort out the other stuff, because
the boy who cried ``dwarf planet!'' (that's the IAU,
for short) will scramble its definitions soon again anyway.

Okay! Alright already! In response to countless requests (that's right, I
haven't counted them, or it, or whatever the pronoun[s] for nonpositive numbers
is or are or whatever) to lift the confusion created by the IAU, I am issuing a
new SBF Directive on dwarf planets. A dwarf planet is a planet whose humanoid
inhabitants are mostly dwarves or seem to walk awkwardly but aren't obese. If
the planet has no humanoids, it may qualify on the basis of bonsai trees.

You know, that long parenthetical in the last paragraph reminds me of the great
French grammarian Dominique Bouhours,
S.J.; when he died in 1702, his last words are
reputed to have been:

Je vais ou je vas mourir, l'un et l'autre se dit ou se disent.

Loosely, this is `I am going to or I is going to die; either is said or are
said.' The first clause of the original sounds at least as atrocious in Modern
French as that of the translation does in English. (And for about the same
reason: use of non-first-person verb with first-person subject. It's the
second-person familiar form in French, but I used the third person in English
since that's a recognizable nonstandard usage.) During Bouhours's lifetime,
however, ``je vas'' was accepted usage.

Commander's Emergency Response Program. A program of the
Development Fund for Iraq (DFI) that assists Iraqi citizens by supporting and
developing local programs and institutions. The projects must not exceed
$500,000 and must demonstrate an important public need. Examples of things
funded include drainage and irrigation projects; building renovations, buses,
and uniforms for schools; hospital equipment, and construction of a fine arts
institute. Supplies and services are primarily purchased from local sources.

CERTiorari. An appeal to the US Supreme Court is a petition for a
writ of certiorari. Thousands of such petitions are filed each year; the
court hears only about a hundred cases per year. According to the rule of
four, at least four of nine justices must agree to hear the case in order for
the writ to be issued.
Cf.cert. den.

CERT

Computer Emergency Response Team. Here are a few relevant
sites/links:

CERTiorari DENied. The Supreme Court refuses to take the case on
appeal. This is not a decision on the merits of the case, and cannot be taken
as indicating approval of the lower court's decision. Interesting.
Cf.cert.

Career Examination Series. A series of ``Passbooks'' (registered trademark) of the NLC.
Exam cram. Here are some bulleted selling points of passbooks (R):

Up-To-Date

Easy To Use

All Tests -- No Filler.

CES

Centre for Educational Sociology.

7 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW.

CES

Circuit Emulation Service.

CES

Community Extension Service[s].

CES

Consumer Electronics Show. In Las Vegas. Every Winter, they host the
Annual Adult Video News Awards, but you won't see any of that in their
web pages.

CES-D

Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression scale.

CESGL

Centre for European Studies and General Linguistics. The old Classics
Department, and I-don't-know-what-other unsalable bits of academic pudding,
were filling for this sausage at the University of Adelaide (in SA). This, according to a June 2001 newsletter of the
ASCS, ``the spellchecker on computers insists on
reading as `cesspool'.''

Well, relax; CEST is gone now. They did their deeds into the early 1990's,
apparently, but by 2008 their homepage was a domainer's generic search form
with no sign of a successor organization. All that's left is some technical
reports and glossary entries.

It was based in London, so it was probably a ``Centre'' rather than a
``Center,'' but the text at vestigial dead links are equivocal on the
question. For your convenience,
however, and also to keep the next two entries together (entries with a common
head term are ordered by alphabetizing by entry content), I won't update that.

CEST

Central European Summer Time. That's what it means most of the time. A
few percent of the time, it means Central European Standard Time, just to screw
me up. CEDT and CDT, with the obvious ``daylight'' expansions, are rare.
Cf.CETinfra.

CET

Central European Time. (Sometimes ``Central European Standard Time''; see
CEST just above.) The name suggests a central
Europe that extends as far west as Spain. CET is standard time zone A
(which see). It's one hour ahead of universal time.
MEZ in German.